This article was originally published by the Duke Pratt School of Engineering. You can learn more about Dr. Dunn and his work with the DANNCE 3D mapping program, which was supported by Duke Forge, a precursor organization to AI Health, in an article available at the Duke AI Health website.
The subjects in the research videos created by Timothy Dunn, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, aren’t immediately obvious. Rather than show tufts of fur or swishing tails, the animal models––usually mice or rats––are instead depicted by straight lines and colorful dots that move around an otherwise empty screen.
These videos are created through the program DANNCE, short for 3-Dimensional Aligned Neural Network for Computational Ethology, a tool Dunn and his team developed in 2021. Using videos of freely moving rats, the team trained machine-learning algorithms and neural networks to identify and map the precise 3D locations of the body joints on the animals. Researchers could then relate these measurements to data collected from brain recording technologies to examine links between neuronal activity and specific behaviors.
READ MORE